Just Surrender... Read Online Free PDF Page A

out, but then worried that he had a type. What if he was fatally attracted to toxic blondes? Quickly he slammed the last of his whiskey.
    “I’m not a natural blonde.”
    “Neither was Cynthia,” he volunteered in unchilvarious fashion.
    Edie giggled again. This time, Tyler smiled back.
    “I could buy you a lap dance,” she offered, sounding so sympathetic it should have touched his heart.
    You could give me a lap dance, he thought, and decided he wouldn’t drink anymore. Someone needed to stay in charge. God forbid that it was her.
    “Do you know why she dumped you?”
    “She didn’t dump me,” he protested, although why he was lying he didn’t know. Cynthia had dumped him. Rejected him. Humiliated him. And if he were smarter, he’d be milking this for all the sympathy points that he could get. As a specialist in coronary bypass, Tyler understood how easily the heart could be manipulated.
    He lowered his head, the very picture of dejection. “You’re right.”
    At his words, Edie put a comforting arm around his shoulders, and Tyler shamelessly moved in closer, drawn to her warmth, her generous nature, the feel of her warm and generous breasts brushing against him. Unsurprisingly, some of the sting of rejection disappeared.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, and once again he heard the tenderness in her voice. He was a virtual stranger, and an unchivalarous stranger at that. Before meeting Edie, he had thought that New Yorkers were hard-hearted and cynical, unmoved by the pathos of human suffering…
    Except for this one.
    He met her eyes. “Thank you,” he told her, feeling sincere, grateful and yes, still painfully aroused.
    “Do you want to meet paradise?”
    “I’d love to,” he agreed, his mind already transported to a lurid paradise where there was no dirt, no naked gyrating dancers…unless it was Edie. He’d let her dance. As long as she was naked. Paradise sounded perfect.
    However, instead of taking his hand and leading him away from this chaos, she stood and waved her hand, gesturing wildly to one of the dancers.
    Enlightenment shouldn’t hurt so much.
    “Is that paradise?” he guessed, as the buxom redhead bounced and buoyed her way toward him. Painful enlightenment rolled in his gut.
    “What do you think?” asked Edie, looking extraordinarily pleased with herself as she started on the introductions.
    “Tyler, meet Paradise, aka Anita.”
    Anita held out her hand, and politely Tyler shook it, not wanting to stare at what had to be 42 Double D, but somehow he knew that laws of nature and gravity had both been violated in the altering of her breasts.
    “You have to be nice to Ty. I put him through crap tonight. Girlfriend dumped him, then I had a flat, which he changed in the rain by the way, and didn’t even complain. Not once. He let me drive into Brooklyn, and didn’t bitch about it, even though I knew he knew we weren’t in Manhattan. And he’s a visiting Gemini from Houston.”
    Her words were tribute to a man who was swimming upstream in a tide of lascivious spawn, and whose very life now depended on getting Edie Higgins out of her clothes. Not wanting to disappoint her, Tyler adopted the humble aspect of a man who could do no wrong.
    “You poor man,” Anita cooed, as Edie wandered over to the bar.
    The dancer moved in closer, eyelashes aflutter, and began stroking his arm.
    Tyler tried to focus on her face, rather than her bare breasts, and happily noted the absence of forehead wrinkles that indicated either skin injections or a curious lack of stress in her life. He scanned the room, noted the glistening skin, the sultry dips and shakes, and knew it had to be BOTOX. If he spent every night in this place, he’d be ready for BOTOX, too.
    “How do you know Edie?” he asked, finding a square of ceiling tile to concentrate on.
    “We met at NYU.”
    “You’re a student?” he asked, proudly not jumping when a dancer gyrated dangerously close to him. “Economics.”
    “Of